


Old Shoes, New Perspectives

by leviathans_moon



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 05:33:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3345401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leviathans_moon/pseuds/leviathans_moon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out to be a quiet moment amidst ruins which makes history come true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Shoes, New Perspectives

**Author's Note:**

> This was my entry for the merlin_games a few years back. it was based on the following picture prompt:  
> 
> 
>  
> 
> There is also a podfic available for it, which can be found  
> [here](http://leviathansmoon.podbean.com)
> 
> Huge thank you to everyone on merlin_games, that was so much fun.
> 
> Also thank you to demi for beta-listening the podfic and to the GSD_catchup comm on livejournal as well as the GSD_fandom mibbit chat for the encouragement both then and now. You guys are the best!

He sat down at the top of the cracked stone stairs, his old shoes familiarising themselves again with what was left of this once magnificent building. He’d seen it in its most glorious days, during revolutions, wars, tourism overflow and storms of nature, but never like this. He rubbed at his tired eyes, feeling very much like the old man that he was. 

A strong gust of wind swept his black hair up in a frenzy. His skin itched with the bite of the wind and he scratched the scar on his left cheek. He’d had it for four centuries now and it was still the one that bothered him the most. The one that didn’t let go. More so now that the state of the world resembled the one back then.

He turned to his right to look at the young man – no, the boy – standing in an alcove in the wall and envied him.

Arthur returned his look with shining eyes. “Did you see the submarine? That is so cool! Can we go there? I’ve never seen a real one before, only pictures.”

Merlin’s eyes reflected the amusement of his past – Arthur had always loved to play with metals -, but his voice was serious. “I wouldn’t venture too close, Arthur. They’re dangerous, even more so for having lain around unattended for too long.” 

Arthur looked disappointed, like a child whose toy had been taken away. In a way, he was such a child. 

“Where are we?” asked Arthur, jumping down from where he’d looked out over the water and ruins. 

“London.”

Arthur sat down next to Merlin and shrugged with his shoulders.

“It was the capital of Great Britain.” Merlin took in the damaged landscape and added in a whisper, “a long time ago.”

“What’s a capital?”

Merlin huffed a laugh and again looked at Arthur with envy. He was so blissfully ignorant. 

“It used to be a great city with kings and queens, watching over the country.” 

“Where’s the castle?” asked Arthur earnestly. Merlin had been there when the nurse had read old stories to Arthur. Kings and Queens always had castles. There must be one here. 

“We’re going to have to rebuild it.” 

“Oh.” Arthur sounded genuinely shocked. “Just us?” 

“I hope not,” said Merlin. He had rebuilt and repaired more castles than he cared to count. All for Arthur and his kingdom, the company he lead, the country he protected, the state he governed, the cause he supported. Some of them had been air castles, but they’d all held up for as long as they needed to. 

It was just... never, never had he been this young. Merlin sighed unconsciously and didn’t notice Arthur’s questioning look. Merlin had found him five years ago in a ghost village in Westwales, a boy of seven, playing in the streets with metals from long before his time. Merlin knew immediately and wished he didn’t. Seven was no age. They’d met when Arthur was 42, 16, 35, 69, 24, 28, 32, 57, 81, 20 and once 14, which nearly got Merlin into prison because neighbours thought he was sexually molesting the teenager. 

Seven.

Never that young. 

The nurse, who Merlin had met when she came running out swinging an old and mouldy cricket rack over her head and screamed at him to leave them alone, agreed with Merlin. Agreed and cursed at him, throwing her arms around Arthur and protecting him as if he were her own. Arthur was too young. A child, just starting to understand the world he was living in and parents dead for so long he didn’t know what parents were. Merlin was afraid of taking him with him. 

But he had to. So they went, left nurse behind - left her waving from the edge of the desolated village with a mixture of confusion, understanding, fear and hope in her eyes - on their way across the country they were supposed to rebuild. 

A child and a destroyed country. They had travelled for years now, searching for other people and houses or towns still standing, but had come across almost nothing but fallen-in roofs, caved-in walls, abandoned towns and caves. They’d met a few old men, always close to dying, barely able to move and defend themselves when Merlin invaded their homes. They wouldn’t join them, couldn’t join them. They were always sad to never be able to see this new world and wished them all the luck and strength that they needed. Merlin grew weary of these old men, as he always did. They reminded him of the reprieve he had never had. 

Once he’d thought he had heard children’s laughter and he and Arthur had stumbled through the same patch of damp forest for days, searching for this new generation, but the laughter was all they ever encountered. Arthur had merely looked forward to new playmates – naturally Merlin was a bit of a disappointment in that aspect – but Merlin had again dared to hope and had his heart pierced. 

From then on he devoted himself to training Arthur. He only once smirked at the irony of that scenario and then let it go as something from his insurmountable past. They stayed in one place for months on end and built up something like a home. They sat in silence or Arthur babbled about the things he used to do or the things he wanted to do. Merlin rarely contributed to such topics. They got into childish fights, Arthur being the passionate aggressor and Merlin the rational wise man. Afterwards, Arthur would often shyly approach Merlin and hug him from behind. Merlin would twist his arm, half hugging him back and they’d forget about it. 

It was a life and maybe they could have gone on like that; a complicated father-son-relationship. 

However, Merlin’s dreams never stopped. He often jerked awake from them with Arthur standing over him; close to tears because he was so afraid. Merlin tried his best to smile and ruffle Arthur’s hair, but Arthur never smiled back. 

He had to set it right.

They. 

He was reminded of the scrabbling panic he had felt during the Third World War. Hell, during the First and Second as well. It wasn’t the panic that Arthur would die; it was obvious that he would and Merlin knew by then he would always come back one day. 

It was the panic to set it right, to put order back in everything. To stop it. 

Arthur had fought on the battlefields, where he belonged, and Merlin had pulled strings in the background and somehow they had managed the end. And Merlin had had to go hide away in a lonely retreat for years afterwards, because he just couldn’t take it sometimes. 

 

They had to set it right. 

 

“What are you thinking about, Merlin?” asked Arthur, sitting hunched together, examining a dead insect that he’d spotted on the stairs. Merlin hadn’t seen one of these in years. It was a pity it was dead. 

“Nothing,” he replied, trying to force a reassuring smile.

“It’s something bad, isn’t it? It always is when you look like that.” 

Arthur could get easily distracted sometimes, which lead to Merlin often underestimating Arthur’s sense of observation. He really shouldn’t be surprised, but he couldn’t help raise an eyebrow before answering:

“Just reminiscing. Nothing to worry about.”

“You sound like one of the old men.” Merlin had always wanted to hear their stories, how they’d experienced ‘the Change’, but Arthur had prodded at the ground with sticks trying to find something interesting while the ‘old men’ had talked. ‘Reminiscing’ didn’t awake interest in Arthur, whose life had had nothing – and everything – to do with the past. 

For Arthur’s ignorance’s sake, he didn’t comment on the ‘old men’ and instead stood up. “Come on, we’ve lingered long enough. Time to move on.” 

Arthur, however, stayed put. “Did you reminisce about what happened here?” 

“Sort of.”

“What did happen here?”

Merlin sighed. Arthur was twelve. Technically, it was high time Arthur developed questions that were beyond “When can we eat?” or “Where are the other children?”, and Merlin had suspected a reason behind the recently more frequent blank stares with furrowed brows or the long silences on their marches through less dangerous lands. Secretly, however, he had hoped that Arthur would leave that big question in peace for just a little longer. He didn’t want to answer it. 

You shouldn’t have brought him here. This place reeks of history.  
“Someone did something he thought was right, but it had repercussions he didn’t expect. The whole world fell apart.”

Arthur looked at him in awe. “Was he very powerful? Was he the King?” 

Merlin smiled at the irony. “No, he wasn’t. And I don’t know if he ... was powerful. The thing he did, didn’t really demand power.”

Arthur looked confused. “I don’t understand that.”

“Remember those small birds we watched three days ago and the way one of them flew to a tree a bit further away, and when it landed, the whole tree shook and you started laughing, because you thought the bird must be really fat?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, a tiny thing can sometimes cause something big to happen, like a bird landing in a tree can make the entire tree shake. Or like a tiny snowflake can cause an avalanche to roll down the mountain.” 

“What’s a snowflake?” 

Merlin raised his eyebrows in bemusement. How do you explain what a snowflake is? 

“It’s kind of like a drop of water?” He paused. “But you understand what I mean, right?”

“Yeah, I guess. He did something small and that small thing did all of this.” 

Merlin nodded, his mind going back to those days when he’d been too shocked to act quickly enough and then too self-centred to care. That in itself might have been the bigger mistake, his faulty reaction, but he often wondered whether he really could have changed or stopped things once they’d started rolling down that mountain. 

Arthur was looking at him expectantly, a small smile tugging at his lips. “Are you going to tell me what he did or can’t you remember?”

“My memory is excellent, if I may say so.” Too excellent. “He...” Merlin hesitated, glancing at Arthur who was looking up at him with a face full of innocence and ignorance, and Merlin knew. This was it. Like so many times before. He felt a nervous tingle slither down his spine and lazy butterflies flapped around in his lower abdomen. As always, he didn’t know whether it was frightful or happy nervousness. 

“He saved someone’s life.”

Arthur stared at him in disbelief. “And that wasn’t good?”

“Sometimes it might look like a good thing, but in reality it isn’t.” Merlin ran a hand through his dark hair, messing up what the wind had so beautifully arranged. “The person he saved was supposed to die at that point. Because he didn’t, the world-“

“Exploded.”

Merlin thought back to those days. Exploded was a good word for what had happened. First tempers, then cities, then whole countries had gone up in flames, followed by ash and water. 

He got up and climbed down the broken stairs towards the edge of the water. It reached up to his knees as he waded a few metres into it. He stopped where he thought the centre of the building had been and looked around, memories of the water cascading through the broken windows, dragging big-mouthed politicians with it and crushing them on the stone walls, memories of the ceiling falling onto them and memories of the dead bodies floating around him flashed in front of his eyes. Who had he been to think he would die in this if he just didn’t move? If he just didn’t stop it. 

“I just wanted to die,” he whispered. He was jerked out of his memories by Arthur’s index finger curling around his right small finger. Two days prior, Arthur had told him that he was too old to hold Merlin’s hand now as he had sometimes done when the woods scared him, but apparently Arthur hadn’t completely given up on the hand-holding yet. 

“Why?” he asked. He didn’t sound scared though. Merlin looked at him, decided to tell him the truth and then didn’t.

“Nothing.” Maybe a few months more, maybe Arthur could remain a child for just a few months more. “We should move on, I’d like to get onto that long island we saw from up there to make camp for the night.”

“Just the ramblings of an old man, yeah?” Arthur hadn’t let go of Merlin’s finger. And Merlin knew it was too late.

“Old but wise, Arthur,” he joked, although he didn’t feel like laughing. 

Arthur’s hand wrapped around his, gripping tight. Merlin stared ahead, his fear, cowardice and guilt crushing onto him like a storm.

“Next time, don’t try to save me, you idiot.” The I’m not worth it was implied and Merlin understood. 

“I mean, look at the mess you’ve put us in. I’m bloody 12, we’re surrounded by water in the middle of nowhere in a destroyed world that we have to fix, and the only company I’ve got is you.”

Merlin closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath. He touched the scar on his left cheek again, the memory of Arthur’s bayonet making his nerves tingle with discomfort. 

“How long have you known?”

Arthur let go of his hand. “A while. The memories kept creeping up on me.” 

“I’m sor-“ A hand came up on his shoulder and squeezed it tightly before letting go again. 

Like so many times before.

“Merlin! Let’s go.”

He dropped his hand from his cheek and forgot about that one time he was truly hated, and followed Arthur who crashed through the shallow water, looking like he belonged in this decrepit world.


End file.
